The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

This morning, some readers alerted us that they were having problems with their cable TV. Were they alone? Were they being punished by the entertainment gods on a federal holiday? No, as far as we know, that isn’t actually a thing. What we do know is that there are outages reported in cities across the country, and Comcast’s Twitter team is posting so rapidly that their wrists may be on fire. UPDATE: The outage is over.

The ever-helpful Downdetector.com shows us on their “heat map” that outage reports are concentrated on population centers, which makes sense, and that people are reporting problems with their Comcast connections in cities across the country.

A general message from the @ComcastCares Twitter account apologizing for outages was briefly up, then disappeared, and now the company is replying to individual customers instead.

(Thanks to Stephanie for nabbing this screen cap for us.)

@SarGar08 Mondays….ugh… seriously though, we are working on fixing this as fast as possible, very sorry for the issues / delay – PL

Meanwhile, you won’t find any mention of the outage on the main @comcast Twitter feed, but you will find what was certainly a pre-scheduled message about providing Internet access to disadvantaged children. Customers are feeling rather disadvantaged themselves, and weren’t pleased with the message.

Ironically, the cable company’s “help and support” pages are also down as of this post.

Update: Reader Joseph reports that phone support is down, which makes sense if everyone is calling in at once. “1-800-Xfinity says all circuits are busy,” he writes. “CAN’T EVEN SPEAK TO TECH SUPPORT….”

Second Update: We wrote to Comcast to ask what’s up, and they sent us this statement in response:

We have repaired the temporary network interruption that impacted some of our services this morning. Our engineers continue to work on this issue and almost all services have already been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers.